US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that Al Qaeda and other organizations on the US “terror list” are supporting the Syrian opposition.

Clinton said: “We have a very dangerous set of actors in the region, al-Qaida [sic], Hamas, and those who are on our terrorist list, to be sure, supporting – claiming to support the opposition [in Syria].” [1] Continue reading →

The Occupy movement may be able to forge a powerful alliance with millions of working men and women around a national call to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour. The drive to establish new encampments, while important, is going to be long and difficult. The ongoing efforts to stand up to the foreclosure and mortgage crisis, the marches to hold Wall Street accountable, the protests against stop-and-frisk policies in New York City or police brutality in Oakland, while vital, do not draw the numbers into the streets across the country needed to loosen the grip of the corporate state.

“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture.” — Charles Murray, American Enterprise Institute

“`The problem is a puzzle,’ he said. `No one has the slightest idea what will work,’ he said. `The cupboard is bare.’” — Sabrina Tavernise, “Rich and Poor Further Apart in Education,” The New York Times, February 10, 2010

From the bookRADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
By William T. Hathaway
Published by Trine Day

Jamal Khan is an Afghan journalist who fled his country because of Taliban persecution and now lives in Germany. We met in the apartment of a mutual friend from the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft, the German Peace Society. Jamal is mid-forties, thin, with curly brown hair, tan skin, and clear green eyes that take everything in. We spoke in German, then later reworked the interview from my English translation.

David Makovsky writes in Foreign Policy that “Iranian leaders have struck an increasingly aggressive note. They have threatened a preemptive strike against their foes….” This is shameful. Makovsky knows perfectly well that any sensible reader would interpret “preemptive strike” to mean a military attack, but uses the phrase anyway, even though he knows the implication is false. He links to a New York Times article containing the lead (emphasis added):Continue reading →

by Finian Cunningham
Featured WriterDandelion Salad
East Africa
17 February 2012
The nightmare is over for Canadian man Naser Al Raas after he gained his freedom from a five-year prison sentence in Bahrain.

Family and supporters were jubilant after an appeal court in the Persian Gulf Kingdom acquitted Naser of all charges on Wednesday.

Their relief over the ruling was made all the more emphatic because the 29-year-old Canadian citizen suffers from a congenital heart condition. Nearly a year of illegal detention, torture and military court hearings had taken a severe toll on his health. He was even denied access by the Bahraini regime to the prescription medicine to treat his pulmonary embolism.

This is the twenty-second installment of the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Herein you will find “Part 2” of Chapter 20. (This chapter is very long, and so it will be presented in four parts.) From the perspective of the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of U.S. Constitutional Democracy in 2048, this chapter discusses “what might have been done” to prevent the fall of the old United States into fascism. If present readers find that the warnings from that far-off time have relevance for today’s, that is precisely the intent. Continue reading →

A brief glance at the early 20th century American occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic tell us a great deal about America’s role in the world today. The Dominican Republic is the Western nation on the island that was named Hispaniola by Christopher Columbus, and was later split between Spanish and French rule: Santo Domingo in the west and Saint Domingue in the east. Continue reading →

WASHINGTON, Feb 23, 2012 (IPS) – The failure of a mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get Iranian permission to visit a military testing site mentioned in its latest report has been interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid the discovery of confirming evidence of past work on nuclear weapons.

Noam Chomsky, a world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist, spoke at the University of Arizona on Feb. 8, 2012. His lecture, “Education: For Whom and For What?” featured a talk on the state of higher education, followed by a question-and-answer session.

Chomsky, an Institute Professor and a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked for more than 50 years, has been concerned with a range of education-related issues in recent years. Among them: How do we characterize the contemporary state of the American education system? What happens to the quality of education when public universities become more privatized? Are public universities in danger of being converted into facilities that produce graduates-as-commodities for the job market? What is the role of activism in education? With unprecedented tuition increases and budget struggles occurring across American campuses, these are questions that are more relevant than ever.

I really do care about the direction this country is heading and the way the church is trying to fix it.

These are just some thoughts to think on and issues that should be of concern to us as believers when dealing with a world that is rapidly growing with a scientific mentality denying all things pertaining to God while the church continues preaching to the choir, especially in the self help department. I don’t see the methods of Jesus’ teachings being applied in the religious right’s mentality. I think in many ways it is doing more damage than good and the blowback it could cause is making Jesus look like something He is not. Continue reading →

The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner’s remarkably prescient ‘science fiction’ novel, first published in 1972 concerns the destruction of the entire environment in the US and the rise of a ‘corporately sponsored government’ leading to the eventual total breakdown of US society.

“No one except possibly the late John Brunner…has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.” William Gibson

The Golden Rule

“That which is hateful to you do not do to another ... the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study.” - Rabbi Hillel

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